The Ontario Liberals say layoffs at a Windsor solar panel plant are just the first of many job losses the province will see under a Tory government led by Tim Hudak, pictured in this file photo from November 2010.

The Ontario Liberals are laying the blame for recent layoffs at a Windsor, Ont., solar panel plant at the feet of the opposition Tories, saying Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak’s skepticism of the government’s green energy initiatives is creating an uncertain business environment.

Economic Development and Trade Minister Sandra Pupatello said Friday Siliken Canada’s decision to lay off 57 workers this week due to a slowdown in business is linked to Hudak’s promise to kill Ontario’s feed-in tariff (FIT) program if his party is elected to government in October.

“The minute the leader of the opposition opened his mouth about killing the feed-in tariff, about essentially gutting the Green Energy Act, we felt the chill in the green energy investment business,” Pupatello told reporters at Queen’s Park. “(Hudak) can’t just table this kind of jargon without understanding it has an immediate impact on business investments … worse, he’s now made it part of his platform and that is very, very detrimental to our green energy initiatives.”

PC economic development critic Peter Shurman hit back, saying Hydro One and the Ontario Power Authority have been slow in approving the addition of renewable energy to the power grid, leaving producers to wonder when they will be able to sell their electricity.

“The Liberals are the ones who put together the FIT program and they can’t accommodate the requests for people to go online because the grid won’t sustain it,” Shurman told the Star. “Anything they perceive as good, they take credit for and anything that’s bad is somebody else’s fault.

“The bottom line is that this has got nothing to do with Tim Hudak and the Progressive Conservative Party.”

The threshold for renewable electricity input set by the OPA is currently a mere 7 per cent.

Under the FIT program, the Liberals have promised to pay producers as much as 80 cents per kilowatt-hour for small rooftop solar energy, when the going rate on the open market is about five cents.

Shurman said his party believes renewables are “definitely” part of the electricity mix in the province but stressed that paying green energy producers more than 10 times the going rate is “impossible.”

Siliken Canada general manager Paco Caudet said energy companies are hesitant to make further investments in technology when they aren’t sure what measures a PC government might take with regard to the Green Energy Act.

“Tim Hudak’s comments create uncertainty in the market,” he told the Star. “Electric companies say, ‘Hey, why should we hook up when this whole thing might change in a couple of months?’ People are holding back because of that uncertainty.”

Caudet, who moved to Canada from Spain to work in Ontario’s green energy sector, said all politicians should either “stay out of the debate” or send a clear signal that the government believes it’s in the interest of the province to have such an industry.

“If Hudak makes a political issue of this to win the next election, it is going to have a ripple effect in the whole industry and there’s going to be money leaving the country and manufacturers like us will have to lay off people,” he said, noting that there are already some 8,000 jobs in the province’s solar business alone. “That’s the reality.”

He said many of his company’s laid-off workers would be able to return to work in the next few weeks, thanks to an uptick in solar panel orders prompted by an aggressive price cut he decided to make. The layoffs came just a few months after the company opened its 121-person plant this spring.

But he tempered the good news by saying, “This is a survival thing. This will keep us going for another month or two.”

NDP MPP Gilles Bisson said his party agrees in principal with the move to green energy, but criticized the Liberals for moving ahead with the plan without ensuring sufficient capacity in the transmission system.

He said there have been several instances in his riding (Timmins-James Bay) where producers have been welcomed into the FIT program only to be told the transmission system can’t handle the added power.

“People are very frustrated, very mad and a hell of a lot poorer at the end of this process,” Bisson said.

Pupatello said she will try to improve the speed with which Hydro One and the OPA approve green energy hookups.

“The Green Energy Act literally isn’t even two years old yet. So it’s relatively new as a function of government policy,” she said. “That means that even all of our agencies that deal with electricity have gone through growing pains and are changing how they do business, being responsive to their consumers, including the level of transmission requirements.”

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